problems with skin shade on cs

[maniacwolf]

hi guyz!!

i was attempting to make some of the ugly characters of oblivion to be not much ugly but, the skin shade control (or any texture control on cs) won't work!! any slide of that control do anything, and im kinda tired looking at answers... anyone have an idea

 

BTW: i'm trying to use a cosmetic compilation mod (eyes, hair, etc...), but even without it anything happen (loading only the oblivion esm.) that dont seems to work neither

[David Brasher]

The way things are set up in Oblivion, it is not simple to make extreme changes to NPC skintone. I was working on a mod where I wanted to have one monstrous NPC have pitch black skin and another monstrous one have bright red skin. If I got really extreme with the slider bars I could do it (In the CS.) (Temporarily.) But my changes would not show up in the game. The NPCs would have ordinary-colored skin. Then the changes would stop showing up in the CS next time I looked.

 

So I got ticked of and made experimental new textures to use for skin on a new custom race. My texture was a featureless black field. I applied it to the NPC and he had purple skin!

 

So I realized that this was probably an issue related to material properties. The Nifskope settings change the way light is reflected and emitted sometimes very drastically. So if you are trying to do something like what I was, you might need to learn a bunch about NifSkope and do a bunch of tinkering to get things to come out right.

 

If you have a bunch of cosmetic mods, deactivating them won't get rid of all their effects. You would have to remove all the added meshes and textures too. So when you tested in what you thought was vanilla Oblivion, it probably was not actually an unmodded copy of Oblivion. Your replacer mods were possibly messing up your test.

[maniacwolf]

hmmm... so you are suggesting the cosmetic mod may been causing problems?? well i have roberts male body and hgec body replacers, along with another one called CCC, and... there is no way to correct that problem from the cs?? i mean, i was about to re-make a lot of npc's and i can't use nifscope or similars due software problems on my pc... there is no way you know for fix the glitch??

[David Brasher]

What happens when you use the sliders? I use the vanilla Oblivion body model in my game and the slider bars work just fine. I can make complexions lighter or darker within the color ranges that you would expect real people to be. (Like I can make an imperial really pale or really tanned.) I am not sure how the various body mods work. I suppose it is possible that some of them ruin the slider bars and make it so you are stuck with a preset skintone.

 

At a more basic level, do you have things set up so that the CS works? Can you actually build a mod and save it and have it work when you install it? If you use Windows Vista or Windows 97, you have to take certain measures before you can mod. Another way to put the question would be, "Have you successfully made another mod that changed something totally different than skintone?"

[maniacwolf]

mmm... not shure if this fit in your criteria, but i was testing the sliders by trying to make Martin (Uriel's son) more like prince charming, mooded the age, face shape, and attempted to do with skin tone, i moved the sliders but that was the only thing i couldn't change, even the hair changed... no crash or atomic explosion (i used to play fallout)

 

 

UPDATE: i discovered than if i create a totally new npc, i can actually change any valor at wish, but no with pre-created (almos vanilla) NPC's... gives you an idea??

[David Brasher]

That is an odd situation. You might try randomizing Martin's face and then rebuilding it the way you want. There is a possibility that doing that could break thing things loose and allow skintone changes. There is also the issue of display lag and memory. The CS will not update all changes such that they are visible immediately, or in some cases, until the objects in question are removed from the world and re-added. In some cases you have to close the CS and reload your mod to see changes in the CS, play-test to see the changes in-game, or play-test with a clean save to see the changes in-game.

 

But I would not advise deleting the Martin reference in Kvatch Chapel and adding a new one back in. He has a reference ID and you will mess up lots of things in the main quest if you don't reconnect everything you severed.

Edited September 25, 2011 by David Brasher

[maniacwolf]

mmm... seems complicated that way... also the randomize doesn't work, everything changes but not skin tone... i readed something in the official site, here, let me put it here so you can tell me what you think

 

Notes

 

The texture feature here is the same as the Tone selection on the Race Menu screen. *Unfortunately, changes in texture on the Face Advanced tab will neither display nor apply for NPCs whose facial texture has been Exported and saved into Oblivion.bsa. The reason is currently unknown. If you wish to alter facial texture for these NPCs, you must either ArchiveInvalidate or replace the texture file. (Oblivion\Data\Textures\Faces\Oblivion.esm\(8-digit_FormID)_0.dds)

 

 

that is what it says... but no much idea what it means...

[David Brasher]

Interesting, I just went into the CS and edited Martin's face. I could do anything I wanted with it. I made it ghostly white, dark black, pink, yellowish. It seems that this problem is limited to your computer and probably random other ones.

 

I don't understand archive invalidation very well. It is mainly for people who use 250 mods all the time. I tend to only keep about 80 active. The computer basically suffers information overload. Multiple mods tell it to edit the same mesh and texture paths in different ways, and the computer glitches out. The last mod in the load order is supposed to win, but this does not happen when you have an archive invalidation problem.

 

So someone here who always runs 250 mods could probably tell you how to ArchiveInvalidate a file.

 

I went and looked, and I do not know how you tell which NPCs use which facial textures. So I do not know how you would figure out which texture to archive invalidate or replace with a different texture. Perhaps the people who are good at transferring faces from a player character to an NPC would know more about this?

 

You might want to have another modder edit Martin's skintone for you on their computer and send it to you. Alternately, you might try modding on another computer.

[maniacwolf]

this... seems to be a dead end... last thing, i use Win 7, I've heard about some incompatibilities sith that OS, even i'm having a hard time wit running 3D's max and blender... guess something wrong with the .Net framework... seems i need to throw my pc through the window...

 

I have no more to say, but if u discover more about this little issue, i'll be here, thanks a lot 4 the support!!

[LFact]

For stock NPCs, the skin tone won't be changed via CS, because they do not use tone slider, but pre-generated textures: Have you checked 'NPC Face Color Unlocker', which is actually dummy textures for Stock NPCs?